When a newly drilled well or an old well is opened up on land, the oil/gas under pressure is driven to the surface and causes environmental problems if not stopped. This invention provides a means to stop and control the pressure encountered, and using a special new conception, the leak paths will be temporarily or definitively sealed up with the help of seal monitoring systems remotely controlled at the surface.
The present invention accepts the fact that there is unknown volumes and quantities of pressure encountered when drilling, and the sealing capping function there must be acknowledged and worked with, so that the flow can be captured and stopped. Since the pressure is there, then the solution of the problem should not be the approach used nowadays, that is, to fight it. Instead, such technique is reversed and that pressure is used to help the capping process.
The drill string tool operation can lower the containment valve and close out the flow with the valve, from above. In short, we are closing the well by plugging the well flow, with the well own pressure. In order to achieve more sources of oil and gas, the oil industry has found it possible to additionally retrieve the oil/gas from dry land through a new process called fracking where they drill down through the deep earth into stratus containing oil and gas shale and with explosive technology they crack the shale to retrieve the immense quantities of oil/gas captured there. Oil and gas retrieved in this manner come to the surface with intense pressure from the fracking process and the inherit pressure released from the shale encompasses the oil/gas.
It has been determined that in the continental area of the United States there is more than one hundred years of oil and gas available. To retrieve this store house of energy will require hundreds of exploratory sites for drilling well holes in the earth and with the fracking process the industry will have to pipe the pressured oil/gas to the surface in risers or casement tubes. Each of these wells contains oil and gas captured in the high pressure drilling process. It is very difficult to control this high pressure oil and gas as it seeks out small leak pads between structural members and cracks, and separated structural joints of well components.
It only takes a small opening or gap to propagate into high pressure escape route to create future problems and risks for both the well and its operators. There is a need for a method or a technologic improvement to close down, or metering down by electronically or otherwise monitoring the desired escape routes to the surface for these gases that are encountered when opening up a new well or closing down a previously drilled well.
In a recently reported study it was revealed that there are many companies, of all sizes, searching and drilling for oil and gas. However, due to either economic constraints or limited outdated know-how and/or equipment, the wells that are being activated have encountered leak problems that have not been duly and effectively controlled and stopped. High pressure gases that they have been coping with are indeed difficult to confine and control. Because of these conditions, and having in mind the high costs and risks that have been encountered, there is an extreme need to face and effectively avoid this reality. Considering the thousands of the previously drilled wells around the world, there is a dire need for a new method and positive solution for applying a corrective action for the problem of leakage of oil. This invention presents a method for stopping such leaks in a cost effective way to avoid the problem for either newly drilled or previously drilled wells. This invention also provides a stop flow method for control of oil and gas flow to the surface, and an electronic remotely monitored process for controlling these fine line structural leak paths that grow too large, costly, damaging well crisis which crop up in the news and destroy the confidence of the public and of environmentalists. Even in the cases of wells that have been plugged up before, and there is a need to reopen and reactivate them, or when wells show either permanent or eventual low leakage, or not extreme pressures, the second embodiment of the present valve will be a solution to cope with these conditions as a heavy-duty doughnut-shaped expandable insert can optionally be added to the valve to work in such way that will compensate for the insufficient oil/gas pressures encountered, by inducing a stoppage component.